Restaurant Review: AhSo

Central alum Jason Maddens opens a place of his own in Ashburn's Brambleton neighborhood.

Cost:

AhSo’s goat-sausage-stuffed corn dog.

About AhSo

Cost:

cuisines
American
Location(s)
22855 Brambleton Plz
Ashburn, Virginia 20148-4870
Good For
Good Drinks

If I told you I was eating potato skins and drinking a frozen cocktail in Ashburn, you might think I was slumming it, culinarily speaking.

Hardly. In fact, I’m sitting in a handsome, window-wrapped dining room. And the chef who has carefully fried those skins until they became feathery, then topped them with sous-vide chicken, mozzarella, and buttermilk dressing, is none other than Jason Maddens, former chef at Central Michel Richard in DC and managing partner/chef at Clarity, the esteemed Vienna bistro.

Snacks like those potatoes—plates that Maddens and his staff gorge on after a shift and that also include a goat-sausage corn dog—are among the top reasons to pay AhSo a visit. So are the cocktails, which include a minty bourbon-and-peach refresher and a gently spiced mai tai.

Maddens hasn’t abandoned his fine-dining roots, but you can tell he’s having more fun at this place of his own (it was all a dream, reads a neon sign by the open kitchen). An appetizer of tuna niçoise elevates the composed salad with a thinly sliced roulade of raw tuna, plus tomato confit and dabs of herbed aïoli and olive tapenade. A bed of grits shows off beautifully seared scallops ringed with chorizo and pickled fennel stalks. Less successful: underseasoned fried oysters, a play on Rockefeller.

Among the entrées, a duo of chicken shows off Maddens’s split personality. On one side of the plate is a perfectly roasted bone-in chicken breast, on the other a crunchy fried leg. A grilled bavette steak—as flavorful as flank—is nearly upstaged by a bowl of yuca that’s tossed, Mexican-street-corn-style, with aïoli and cotija cheese. Although a vegetarian play on spaghetti and meatballs is one of the few constants on the ever-changing menu (Maddens uses spaghetti squash and lentil-quinoa orbs in it), the riff lacked much verve. And desserts, such as a stale-tasting gluten-free brownie sundae, have tasted a bit phoned in.

Still, these kinds of restaurants—and this caliber of chef—have until now been in short supply in Ashburn. Maddens wanted to open a restaurant closer to his home, and he instantly fell for the Brambleton development and its town center. “Everyone who lives here has drunk the Kool-Aid,” he says of the neighborhood. “They all love it.”

Looking around the dining room on my last visit, I saw kids perched with iPads, friends lingering over wine, and folks pop-ping in for a bowl of the popular ramen the kitchen serves on Wednesday nights—plus a lot of full seats. Looks like Maddens has created exactly what the neighborhood needs.

AhSo

22855 Brambleton Plaza, Ashburn; 703-327-6600

Open Tuesday through Saturday for dinner, Sunday for brunch and dinner.

Expensive

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Washingtonian.


Ann Limpert
Executive Food Editor/Critic

Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.